Whoosh. It was getting closer.
Whoosh! Two away.
WHOOSH!! Next door. A suspicion of the wet smell of steam came to him.
Hold tight, Bond said to himself. He smothered her in towards him and held his breath.
Now. Quick. Get it over, damn you.
And suddenly there was a great pressure and heat and a roaring in the ears and a moment of blazing pain.
Then dead silence, a mixture of sharp cold and fire on the ankles and hands, a feeling of soaking wet and a desperate, choking effort to get pure air into the lungs.
Their bodies automatically fought to withdraw from each other, to capture some inches of space and air for the areas of skin that were already blistering. The breath rattled in their throats and the water poured off the cement into their open mouths until they bent sideways and choked the water out to join the trickle that was oozing under their soaking bodies and along past their scalded ankles and then down the vertical walls of the shaft up which they had come.
And the howl of the steam pipe drew away from them until it became a whisper and finally stopped, and there was silence in their narrow cement prison except for their stubborn breathing and the ticking of Bond’s watch.
And the two bodies lay and waited, nursing their pain.
Half an hour-half a year-later, Walter and Krebs and Drax filed out below them.
But, as a precaution, the guards had been left behind in the launching dome.
CHAPTER XXIV
ZERO
“THEN WE’RE all agreed?”
“Yes, Sir Hugo,” it was the Minister of Supply speaking. Bond recognized the dapper, assured figure. “Those are the settings. My people have checked them independently with the Air Ministry this morning.”
“Then if you’ll allow me the privilage,” Drax held up the slip of paper and made to turn towards the launching-dome.
“Hold it, Sir Hugo. Just like that, please. Arm in the air.” The bulbs flashed and the bank of cameras whirred and clicked for the last time and Drax turned and walked the few yards towards the dome, almost, it seemed to Bond, looking him straight in the eye through the grating above the door of the site.
The small crowd of reporters and cameramen dissolved and straggled off across the concrete apron, leaving only a nervously chatting group of officials to wait for Drax to emerge.
Bond looked at his watch. 11.45. Hurry up, damn you, he thought.
For the hundredth time he repeated to himself the figures Gala had taught him during the hours of cramped pain that had followed their ordeal by steam, and for the hundredth time he shifted his limbs to keep the circulation going.
“Get ready,” he whispered into Gala’s ear. “Are you all right?”
He could feel the girl smile. “Fine.” She shut her mind to the thought of her blistered legs and the quick rasping descent back down the ventilator shaft.
The door clanged shut beneath them followed by the click of the lock and, preceded by the five guards, the figure of Drax appeared below striding masterfully towards the group of officials, the slip of lying figures in his hand.
Bond looked at his watch. 11.47. “Now,” he whispered.
“Good luck,” she whispered back.
Slither, scrape, rip. His shoulders carefully expanding and contracting; blistered, bloodstained feet scrabbling for the sharp knobs of iron, Bond, his lacerated body tearing its way down the forty feet of shaft, prayed that the girl would have strength to stand it when she followed.
A last ten-foot drop that jarred his spine, a kick at the grating and he was out on the steel floor and running for the stairs, leaving a trail of red footprints and a spray of blood-drops from his raw shoulders.
The arcs had been extinguished, but the daylight streamed down through the open roof and the blue from the sky mingling with the fierce glitter of the sunshine gave Bond the impression that he was running up inside a huge sapphire.
The great deadly needle in the centre might have been made of glass. Looking above him as he sweated and panted up the endless sweep of the iron stairway, it was difficult for him to see where its tapering nose ended and the sky began.